Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “Other Plans” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet. This book is now available for free online.
Russia is a country with a negative population growth caused by “a collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic surge in the death rate.”64 The country has a 0.6 percent population decrease, which means it will lose 22 percent of the population by 2050. That adds up to thirty million fewer people.65
One reason for the decline is that Russia has an extremely high involuntary infertility rate. Somewhere between 13 and 20 percent of married couples are infertile, and that number may be rising.66 For women, one of the main causes was a society-wide reliance on abortion as a form of birth control, abortions often done under substandard medical conditions. The literal scars of such procedures have left many women unable to conceive or carry to term. Sexually transmitted diseases are also a culprit—rates of syphilis are literally hundreds of times higher in Russia than in other European countries.67 Marriage rates have dropped and divorce rates risen, and 30 percent of Russia’s babies are being delivered to single mothers—this in a country too poor to offer public benefits. Women can’t afford to have more children.
Add to that a mortality rate that is “utterly breathtaking.”68 Tuberculosis, AIDS, alcoholism, and the disappearance of socialized medicine have pulled the numbers up. The main two causes of death, though, are cardiovascular disease (CVD), which in thirty-five years increased 25 percent for women and an astounding 65 percent for men, and injury. The increases in CVD is traceable to smoking, poor diet, sedentarism, and severe social stress. The injury category includes “murder, suicide, traffic, poisoning and other violent causes.”69 The violence is so bad that the death rate for injury and poisoning for Russian men is twelve times higher than for British men. And both CVD and the violence are helped along by vodka, which Russians drink at an extraordinary rate, equivalent to 125 cc “for everyone, every day.”70
Population in Russia is dropping dramatically without a cataclysmic event or a Pol Pot–styled genocide, which the authors of this book are often accused of suggesting. Though each individual death is its own world of tragedy, the deaths have not collectively brought daily life—or even the government—to a halt.
Russia may best illustrate the kind of slow decline of which Greer writes; and Russia’s disintegration is not even based on energy descent, as oil and gas are still abundant. The former USSR may give us good insights into people’s responses to economic decline, and how best to survive it, but as an example it does not address the conditions of biotic collapse that are our fundamental concern.
Except in one instance: Chernobyl. Ninety thousand square miles were contaminated with radiation; 350,000 people were displaced; and there is a permanent “exclusionary zone” encompassing a nineteen-mile radius and the ghosts of seventy-six towns.
But other ghosts have come back from the dead. Because despite the cesium-137 that’s deadly for 600 years and the strontium-90 that mammal bones mistake for calcium, Chernobyl has become a miracle of megafauna: the European bison have returned, as well as, somehow, the Przewalski’s horse. There are packs—that’s plural—of wolves. There are beavers coaxing back the lost wetlands. There are wild boar. There are European lynx. There are endangered birds like the black stork and the white-tailed eagle, glorious in their eight-foot wingspans. All this even though ten years after the accident, geneticists found small rodents with “an extraordinary amount of genetic damage.” They had a mutation rate “probably thousands of times greater than normal.”71 Yet twenty years after the accident, and with multiple excursions into the contaminated area, the same researcher, Dr. Robert Baker, said flat-out, “The benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chernobyl radiation.”72 Witnessing the return of bison and wolves, who could say otherwise? Even a nuclear disaster is better for living creatures than civilization. And the real, if fledgling, hope: this planet, made not by some Lord God but instead by the work of all those creatures great and small, could repair herself if we would just stop destroying.
Bison in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
There are better ways to reduce our numbers than through alcoholism, syphilis, and nuclear accidents. We don’t need to wring our hands in helpless horror, stuck in a wrenching ethical dilemma between human rights and ecological drawdown. In fact, the most efficacious way to address the twin problems of population and resource depletion is by supporting human rights.
One of the great success stories of recent years is Iran. People’s desire for children turns out to be very malleable. Even in a context of religious fundamentalism, Iran was able to reduce its birthrate dramatically. In 1979, Ayatollah Khamenei dissolved Iran’s family planning efforts because he wanted soldiers for Islam to fight Iraq (and n.b. to those who still think they can be peace activists without being feminist). The population surged in response, reaching a 4.2 percent growth rate, which is the upper limit of what is biologically possible for humans. Iran went from 34 million people in 1979 to 63 million by 1998.73 Let’s be very clear about what this means for women. Girls as young as nine were legally handed over to adult men for sexual abuse: for me, the word “marriage” does not work as a euphemism for the raping of children.
The population surge proved to be a huge social burden immediately, and Iran’s leaders “realized that overcrowding, environmental degradation, and unemployment were undermining Iran’s future.”74 Health advocates, religious leaders, and community organizers held a summit to strategize.
They knew that free birth control was essential, but it wouldn’t be enough. All the major institutions of society had to get involved. Family planning policies were reinstituted and a broad public education effort was launched. Government ministries and the television company were brought into the project: soap operas took up the subject. Fifteen thousand rural clinics were founded and eighty mobile health care clinics brought birth control to remote areas. Thirty-five thousand family planning volunteers were trained to teach people in their neighborhoods about birth control options, and there were also workplace education campaigns. The government got religious leaders to proclaim that Allah wasn’t opposed to vasectomies; after that, vasectomies increased dramatically. In order to get a marriage license both halves of the couple had to attend a class on contraception. And new laws withdrew food subsidies and health care coverage after a couple’s third child, applying the stick as a backup to the carrots.
The biggest social initiative was to raise the status of women. Female literacy went from 25 percent in 1970 to over 70 percent in 2000. Ninety percent of girls now attend school.75
In seven years, Iran’s birthrate was sliced in half from seven children per woman to under three. So it can be done, and quickly, by doing the things we should be doing anyway. As Richard Stearns writes, “The single most significant thing that can be done to cure extreme poverty is this: protect, educate, and nurture girls and women and provide them with equal rights and opportunities—educationally, economically, and socially.… This one thing can do more to address extreme poverty than food, shelter, health care, economic development, or increased foreign assistance.”76
There is no reason for people who care about human rights to fear taking on this issue. Two things work to stop overpopulation: ending poverty and ending patriarchy. People are poor because the rich are stealing from them. And most women have no control over how men use our bodies. If the major institutions around the globe would put their efforts behind initiatives like Iran’s, there is still every hope that the world could turn toward both justice and sustainability.
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s March 2, 2014 Resistance Radio interview with David Zirin. Zirin writes about the politics of sports for The Nation and many other magazines and newspapers. He is the author or co-author of six books, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Derrick Jensen: How did you find your niche?
Dave Zirin: I grew up a very serious, intense, over-enthused sports fan in New York City in the 1980s. It was a pretty high octane sports time and not just because all of the players were doing cocaine. I didn’t think about politics a great deal during my upbringing, but that changed deal in the 1990s as I was coming of age. I made a real effort to try to find a way to justify or rectify the fact that I wanted to be someone who devoted his life to fighting for social change and I wanted to maintain my sports fandom.
Dave Zirin
The more I looked at sports, the more difficult it was to do. The more you actually look beneath the surface, beneath the adrenaline packed plays, the more you see the rampant nationalism, the insane sexism, the homophobia. If you believe in social justice, sports does not seem like the friendliest place to be. But that perspective really changed for me in 1996 when a basketball player named Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf took the position of not coming out for the national anthem before games. Today if that happened it would be a huge story for 24 hours and then we would go on to something else. But in 1996 this was a huge sports story, big profiles about it, and Rauf was eventually drummed out of the league. I’ll never forget one of the talking heads on ESPN saying that Rauf must see himself in the tradition of activist athletes like Muhammed Ali or Billie Jean King.
I was a huge sports fan and I was not aware that there was this alternative tradition in sports of people who tried to use this hyper-exulted, brought-to-you-by-Nike platform to actually say something about the world. And the more I investigated that the more I started to be fascinated by the fact that so much of this history was hidden from people like myself who were more mainstream sports fans. The second thing that fascinated me was I was seeing parallels to today. I was seeing all the things that a lot of the athletes, then, were talking about—that these struggles were ongoing. That’s really what inspired me to write about it, and it’s definitely not always easy—to put it mildly—because it’s not the friendliest of communities for these kinds of ideas. But, at the same time, the only reason I have a career is that there are a lot of Derrick Jensens out there. People who maybe like sports but hate the practice of viewership because it is so steeped in a right-wing draw and there’s an under-served audience of people who love sports but really don’t like what they’ve become and appreciate a kind of alternative analysis.
DJ: I’ve been a sports fan forever. But, it breaks my heart that they are considered so apolitical. Of course, nothing is apolitical. If something pretends to be apolitical, that supports the status quo.
Derrick Jensen
The Florida State Seminoles and the BCS bowl championship brings together so much of the sexism, the racism against indigenous peoples, and the corporate welfare that characterize so much of the big-money sports.
DZ: Sure, and don’t forget that Jameis Winston, the star quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner of Florida State, had just been cleared of accusations of rape. I’m not going to comment on his innocence or lack thereof. But the investigation itself stunk to high heaven, in terms of how much the local Tallahassee police actually were looking into it. The mentalities that Florida State fans showed towards the young woman for daring to come forward and say that she was sexually assaulted really was a head-spinner. I was getting these really creepy emails from people in Florida State who were, first of all, naming her and encouraging me to out her, which is a journalistic practice I disagree with profoundly. Secondly, they were saying “you should know the real story about her”—what I believe is called “slut-shaming”—talking about her sexual past, and who knows if any of that was true or not? They were actively courting a sports writer, and I wasn’t the only one. There’s a scary culture around sports.
DJ: You mentioned in a recent article that one of the lessons to learn from that whole incident that it’s better to be him than Trayvon Martin in Florida.
DZ: I wrote a piece about that because this country has an unbelievably horrific history of black men accused of rape, particularly in the American South. We can remember Malcolm X’s phrase, “The American South begins at the Canadian border.” But we all know that was a feature of Jim Crow—“hang first, ask questions later,” and famous cases like Emmit Till, a black kid killed for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and the Scottsboro Boys.
Of course, there are so many other times where lynchings took place against black men who were accused of rape. It says a lot about 21st century America that here’s Jameis Winston, accused of rape, and because he’s a football star, the old boy network in Tallahassee rushes to defend him. Tallahassee is not southern Florida—it’s not where my mom grew up, which was with Cubans and Jews. Tallahassee is the old south, and its defense of Winston says something about football culture in the south, and the bizarre effect it has on race and racism there.
Image Credit: Michael Nelson/Epa/REX/Shutterstock (7935715k)
Trayvon Martin was not an athletic star. He was just a kid trying to get home during halftime of the NBA all-star game and you saw the way his death was dealt with in the south and in the power structure, particularly among the police. I’m talking the difference between the sheriff where Trayvon Martin was killed, his not wanting to do anything about that, and the situation in Tallahassee where the local police force are actually telling the woman you don’t want to mess with this player on the Seminoles because that’s serious business right there.
DJ: We can also see the same dynamic in place in Steubenville.
DZ: Maryville, as well. Torrington, Connecticut. The number of cases involving sexual assault by athletes—the only reason we can reference them right now is because of social media and the work of groups like Anonymous who’ve tried to bring them to light. This is ongoing. Is something inherent in jock culture that produces rape culture? And if there is, then how do we combat it?
One of the most hopeful interviews about this subject that I did was with a woman named Katie Hnida. She was a field goal kicker, the first woman to ever score a point in a Division 1 NCAA football game. Katie Hnida’s story is rather horrific. She was going to play for the Colorado Buffaloes—big time NCAA football. She was raped by her teammates, quit the team, and went through every horror story you can imagine for a young woman who accuses someone of rape—let alone football players of rape. She played for New Mexico after that, so she didn’t give up football despite what had happened. And she had an incredibly positive experience on the New Mexico football team. I had a long interview with her where we compared and contrasted those experiences, so we could really try to get at what it is about football in particular, but jock culture in general, that produces rape culture? Can it be isolated? And, frankly, can it be destroyed?
Katie Hnida, an American football player who became the first woman to score in an NCAA Division I-A game, college football’s highest level, as as placekicker for the University of New Mexico Lobos on August 30, 2003.
DJ: What were your and her conclusions?
DZ: That jock culture left unattended becomes rape culture. You have to have people in positions of authority. Partly because of the mentality of football. It’s not grass roots, it’s very militaristic, very top-down, and it’s the people at the top that usually determine what the locker room culture is going to be. That means coaches, head coaches, athletic directors. At the pro ranks it means general managers and team presidents. They create the locker room culture, and unless you have people in authority actively intervening to make it something less toxic, then this is the fruit it will bear.
DJ: That reminds me of some of the stuff I’ve read about the relationship of military culture to rape culture.
A military is going to be at risk for being a high rape culture anyway, but there are some militaries that have had zero tolerance policies for sexual assault that have had much lower rates of rape amongst the soldiers.
DZ: A genetic cousin of rape culture is bullying culture, which we saw in the Miami Dolphins locker room this year with Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin. Incognito bullied his teammate Martin to the point that Martin left the team. Incognito was suspended, and it imposed this discussion on the NFL of how you define “manliness.” Is Richie Incognito the real man because he’s the guy who’s going to beat up anybody who doesn’t do it his way? Or is Martin not the real man, but the real adult because he’s saying, “Wait a minute this isn’t a school yard, this is a workplace, this is a union workplace, and I’m going to stand up for my rights and actually blow the whistle on this thing?” Who do you actually respect more in that context? It’s a question a lot of NFL players had to confront.
What’s the connection between what we were just talking about with rape culture? The main one is that none of that nonsense in the Miami Dolphins locker room would have happened without the tacit, implicit, or explicit okay of the head coaches themselves. They’re the people who create the culture in the locker room. And that culture’s either productive or helpful, or not. A lot of NFL coaches talked about how they dealt with bully culture. There was a real variance. Some coaches had real philosophies about how to actively intervene in bully culture. Wouldn’t it be great if coaches could talk as openly and as publicly about how they deal or don’t deal with rape culture? They’re very similar dynamics. Groupthink, testosterone, a kind of mob mentality, not wanting to be the person who is singled out—all of these things are similar ingredients in both cultures.
When I say rape culture, when I say bully culture, it’s not that everybody who plays sports is a potential rapist or a potential bully. The question of culture is, to me, much more about turning the other way. So you see a potential rape at a party or you see a bullying situation and you don’t say anything. You’re silent in the face of that. That’s what it means by rape culture or bully culture.
Colin Kaepernick, right, and Eric Reid kneeling during the national anthem before an N.F.L. game.
DJ: And we can say, of course, the same thing about sports writers or writers in general when they attend to it or don’t attend to it.
DZ: That’s absolutely correct. That’s one of the things that’s been difficult at times. Anyone who works at a workplace, whether you’re a professor at a university, or a teacher at a public high school like my wife, or at a hotel like my cousin, wants to feel like they have colleagues. Everybody wants to feel like they have the system’s support for the work that they do. It is difficult to do, sometimes, this kind of writing and sports investigative journalism because there are people who would rather you just shut up. You’re the turd in the punch bowl. That’s sometimes difficult, but it’s not as difficult, obviously, as the people who are actually victimized by rape and bullying. I think it’s very minor compared to that. But this is about fighting cultures. It’s not some kind of level playing field where the people with the best ideas win out. It’s much more complicated than that.
DJ: I think everything you’re saying is really great. It reminds me of this study I saw where they had a bunch of people in a waiting room with two people who were in on the test. One would say something overtly racist or overtly sexist to the group. What they found was that the response of the group as a whole was not so dependent upon what the first person said as it was on the response of the other person in on the test who would say, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Then, everyone would look on the statement more approvingly. But if the second person said, “Wow, that’s a terrible thing to say”—expressing disapproval—it gave the other people in the room courage.
I say this in terms of the mob mentality and also what you were saying about the coaches helping to create a culture. If the coach sees it and shuts it down, it’s not going to be reinforced.
DZ: I think that’s absolutely correct. I’ve played on a number of teams over the years and I’ve only had this experience once. The best case scenario would be if the players themselves determined the culture in the locker room. If you have real leadership among people, among good people who attempt to create an atmosphere of respect, you can actually create something that’s positive, there. That’s something that can exist independent of the coach. Unfortunately, though, because hierarchy is so set in sports, that’s a very difficult thing to create organically. In my situation, it only happened because we had all played together on previous teams and then a new coach came in and that new coach was sensitive and smart enough to let us dictate how things went. He would only step in when he felt things going astray. This was basketball, where teamwork and trust is very important. Those are lessons I’ve taken with me my entire life. Most importantly, it keeps me from being too cynical about sports and about sports writing because as bad as it gets, I know it could be better.
DJ: In the face of many of the insanities of this culture, it’s really important to have examples we can look to either in our own experience or in history of people who resisted and actually made a difference.
DZ: It’s so interesting that you say that, too, because the other historical pattern in America (and this is what’s so frustrating) is that when people speak out they’re absolutely vilified for it in the present. Yet decades down the line, the same people who are vilifying them are praising them. Or their children or grandchildren. It’s so much easier to look back in the past than it is in the present day.
I was doing a story recently about the upcoming Sochi Olympics where a lot of athletes may be speaking out on LGBT rights in Russia. One of the heads of the International Olympic Committee was actually praising Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their memorable moment in ’68. He was asked, “Well, what do you think about athletes doing that now?” and it was like a switch flipped. The cognitive dissonance to be able to do that, to me, is absolutely stunning—to be able to just jump so quickly, so abruptly, and so crudely. The intellectual crudeness to be able to go from “Wow, dissent is beautiful” to “Well, not dissent today” to “Politics: keep them out of the Olympics.” It’s unbelievable. And yet, that’s the rhetoric, that’s the discourse, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time.
DJ: And, of course, this is not just in sports. We can say the same thing about John Brown. We can say the same thing about the Haymarket Martyrs. We can say the same thing with the suffragists.
DZ: That’s the truth. It’s usually one of two things—either you’re buried and forgotten or your political teeth are extracted and you’re smoothed down to become something else. We deal with it every year. There are articles about the “real” Martin Luther King by people on the left who try to remind everyone that King actually believed in things that are quite radical even today. Yesterday the Department of Defense was tweeting King quotes— I don’t even think they saw ghoulishness of this—“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.” Is that how the Department of Defense justifies drone bombings overseas? “Yeah, we may be limiting people’s lives but, hey, that’s not really what matters.” Is there any self-consciousness that goes into that? I’m sure if Martin Luther King had been in charge of the Department of Defense, he would have turned it into the world’s most luxuriant day care center. It’s just outrageous.
In sports, though, it’s particularly difficult to get the true stories out. One reason for that is oftentimes the retired athletes themselves don’t necessarily have a vested interest in going back to their more controversial pasts. There’s no money in that. You want to be able to be on the speaker’s circuit. You want to be able to go to autograph shows.
Also, context is everything. It’s easier to be a rebel in 1968 when the fires are burning all around than in 2014, even if those fires are still there just as much as they were in 1968. They just operate in a different way.
DJ: Can we touch on the mascot issue?
DZ: Why would anyone who doesn’t live in Oklahoma even know there was such a thing as the Oklahoma Seminole Nation? When are we taught that in history class? When is the Oklahoma Seminole Nation asked for comment on anything? This is some of the invisibility of racism. Few people in our society are treated with such abject invisibility as Native Americans.
I did a talk at a college in Oregon and I was asked a question by a perfectly well-meaning liberal college student. We were talking about the Washington name change, the “R” word, and this student said to me, “Do you think the reason why there are still teams with Native American mascots is because there are no Native Americans left?”
I understood what he was trying to ask. It’s a demographic question. The reason you don’t have teams named after Latinos or African Americans is because you couldn’t. Native Americans make up 0.9% of the United States. There was a Native American young girl sitting right in front of him. She was 12 years old and she stood up in the meeting and looked at him and said, “There still are some of us left, you know.” You could have heard a pin drop.
It’s this casual racism and invisibility. White people in particular get so damn defensive where if you talk about racism in society it immediately becomes, “Oh, so what we’re all racists.” Because it’s a lot easier to do that than confronting racism itself. This is one of those classic cases. I’m not saying everyone who wears a Redskins cap or a Seminole jersey is a racist like they’re George Lincoln Rockwell 2.0. I am saying we need to do some reflecting about why there’s a team named after a racial slur, about why the Florida State Seminoles are allowed to go around with impunity and say they do this with the seal of approval from the Seminole Nation when the Florida Seminoles don’t even make up forty percent of the Seminoles nationally. That gets to some very interesting points about why the majority of Seminoles are in Oklahoma, and then you have to look seriously at this nation’s past, about the Indian Removal Act. It’s like pulling a string on a sweater. When people are watching sports or enjoying sports that’s the last thing they want to do.
DJ: I didn’t know this about their mascot. Can you mention about Osceola and make a connection to Mandela?
DZ: Absolutely. When Nelson Mandela died, quite correctly he was discussed with the most hushed possible tones—not just in the United States, but around the world. I think one of the reasons why was this person who endured 27 years behind bars emerged as the leader of his country. A remarkable thing. And he was a freedom fighter, of course, behind bars.
Osceola
Osceola was an unbelievable freedom fighter in the Seminole Wars. He fought the US Army to a standstill on multiple occasions. There was supposed to be a treaty with Osceola and when he went to the treaty, he was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. The United States was actually subject to international condemnation because of this. That’s how esteemed Osceola was. And he died in prison. I wrote in my article that Osceola was in many respects the American Mandela if Mandela had never gotten out of Robbin Island, or he is the American Steven Biko—the South African who never came out.
Yet, before Florida State games, you have someone dressed up like Osceola—usually a white person in war paint—who rides out on a horse. Osceola never actually rode a horse because he fought in the swamps. You see this constant miseducation as everyone cheers for Osceola. And, the thing about it that’s hardest to stomach is that Osceola was the replacement of Florida State’s first mascot, who was a step-and-fetch-it Native American character who went by the name of Sammy Seminole. That really was his name. In a weird way, though, Sammy Seminole is more honest for what this is, which is minstrelsy, than Osceola who is an amazing historical figure.
Can you imagine worldwide condemnation if South Africa had someone dressed up like Steven Biko or dressed up like Nelson Mandela to dance around a stadium to psyche people up before a game? You would never see that in a million years. You see that in this country, frankly, because that’s the price of colonialism, depopulation, genocide, Indian Removal. This is what you get.
DJ: Can we do a two-minute version of “sports are just fun and games?” No, actually, they’re big business, with massive corporate welfare.
DZ: There’s no getting around that. This has been a real change in the economics of sports over the last 30 years—the mass infusion of corporate welfare in sports and stadiums really operating like a neoliberal Trojan horse where cities are re-organized on neoliberal grounds.
You and I can go on a magical mystery tour through the former industrial Midwest—Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit. What all these places have in common is new publicly funded stadiums for basketball, baseball, and football. At the same time the erosion of union jobs, and the jobs that are created are service industry jobs. It’s not just the question of public tax money going into these stadiums, it’s the question of the return on the investment, and what jobs are actually created. Unfortunately, far too much of public stadium funding is a magical alchemy that turns tax dollars into private property.
DJ: It’d be like if I wanted to start a business and then I went to the taxpayers to the get funding to build my factory.
DZ: It’s a hell of a scam. Often, it’s a popular thing to get a new stadium, although much less so according to polls over the last fifteen years, as they have clearly and dramatically not returned on their investment, like what happened in Seattle where the beloved Supersonics basketball team was ruthlessly ripped from the city. I think you see the price much more deeply in a place like New Orleans where the levees broke and the only place suitable for shelter was the Superdome, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, when many of the people huddled in there could not have afforded to buy a ticket to actually see a game.
DJ: I read a study back in the early ‘90s about the “multiplier effect” when a new stadium is built. Could you comment on that?
DZ: That’s a classic line about stadium funding. If you literally dumped a billion dollars from a plane, and people just picked it up and spent it, it would have a better economic multiplier effect than the building of stadiums. That in itself exposes these things for what they are.
This is the truth, Derrick, I used to go on radio shows and debate people about public stadium funding and you can’t debate it anymore, because there’s so much data that it’s a terrific waste of money. It’s like debating whether or not the sky is green. No one wants to take that position on it, either. In the context of the new normal of perpetual crisis, in which we find cities starved by gentrification and privatization, the giving of public money isn’t through referendums or public votes, but in paying off the right politicians for their stadiums.
DJ: What’s the take home message of all this? What would you like for sports fans and people who want social change to see? I’m think about the basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the guy you said influenced you back in the 90s, who played for the Denver Nuggets. It seems to me that his courage helped give you courage. I think that’s part of how social change takes place. One person stands up, and you stand up and hold his hand. Now the hope is that someone else will stand up and hold your hand, until we don’t have to have these discussions any more.
DZ: I think that’s great. I would also say that for a lot of these athletes the best thing we can do in the media is to be an ally. That’s like being an offensive lineman—you want to clear space so their voice can be heard. If people are saying your name too much, you might be doing something wrong.
DJ: This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. Thank you so much.
According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, the planet is in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event. Strikingly, the scientists who wrote the article call this a “biological annihilation.”
This isn’t a random sequence outcome of a natural societal development. The dominant global culture (industrial civilization) is a culture of imperialism. We can define that as a culture that colonizes and extracts resources as a standard way of operating.
Industrial civilization has become the dominant culture by violence, and violence maintains it.
Timber is ripped from forests and shredded for sale. Rivers are enslaved to irrigate fields and power cities. Oil is burned to propel commerce. Fracking injects poisons into the planet in order to extract even more petrochemicals. Traditional ways of life and sustainable relationships with the land are destroyed, so the only alternative is the toxic (and profitable) cycle of wage labor, debt, and poverty. Patriarchy teaches men to objectify and dominate women, and women to acquiesce. The result is a loss of bodily autonomy to the point that half of all children are unwanted by the mother, and a culture in which eating disorders are a leading cause of death among young women and teenage girls. The legacy of slavery underlies the modern prison system, where vast profits are made by locking up the powerless and oppressed.
As a friend put it, “oppression is always in service of resource extraction.”
The shiny gadgets used to enthrall us are made possible by child miners in the Congo, by workers toiling to the point of mass suicide in Foxconn factories in China, and by the exportation of e-waste to conveniently isolated locations.
And of course, the military, police, and private security (mercenaries) are ready to beat, imprison, or kill anyone who stands in the way of this system. Finally, this culture’s atomized families and recent trends like the rise of neo-liberalism help ensure we remain isolated physically and emotionally, without the strength that comes from being part of a community.
Between the threat of violence, bribery, and the sense of helplessness that comes from isolation, most people aren’t willing to resist. American culture has been built on genocide for 500 years; at this point, most settlers can’t even imagine a society not based on violence.
For those who can, we need to get serious about our strategies.
MYTHICAL STRATEGIES
In the west, and especially in the United States, most activists operate within a mythic framework of non-violent resistance that’s far different than the liberation politics of the 1960’s and 70’s. In this mythology, violence doesn’t solve anything, and non-violence has a magical ability to win conflicts—even if those victories only occur in hearts and minds.
“We win through losing,” a friend says (sarcastically) of this mindset.
Don’t get me wrong. Non-violence can be a supremely elegant and effective technique for social change. Applied correctly—forcefully—non-violence can immobilize a repressive regime or corporate power, making it impossible to move in any direction. Violence should, of course, be avoided anytime it can be.
But non-violent resistance doesn’t always work. As another friend writes in his excellent multi-part series, “The destruction of our world isn’t an ‘environmental crisis,’ nor a ‘climate crisis.’ It’s a war waged by industrial civilisaton and capitalism against life on earth–all life–and we need a resistance movement with that analysis to respond…the decision about what strategy and tactics to use depends on the circumstances, rather than being wedded to one approach out of a vague ethical dogma…the choice between using non-violence or force is a tactical decision. Those who advocate for the use of force are not arguing for blind unthinking violence, but against blind unthinking nonviolence.”
So what’s next? What happens when non-violence doesn’t work? What should you do when you have voted, petitioned, demanded, protested, raised awareness, locked down, blockaded, and it hasn’t worked?
Do you keep using the same tactics that have failed again and again, hoping they’ll work this time?
Do you give up?
This is not a theoretical question.
It’s a situation that has been faced by many resistance movements throughout history. Lately I’ve been reflecting on one in particular; the Oka Crisis that went down near Montreal in 1990.
After 400 years of gradual land theft, the Kahnesetake band of the Mohawk Nation was left with a fraction of a fraction of its traditional territory. With land “development” encroaching continuously, tensions came to a head in 1990 when plans began moving forward to expand a golf course into an extremely important site: a pine forest next to the tribal cemetery.
Members of the Kahnesetake community went through various channels to fight the expansion, including petitioning local government and the federal Indian Bureau. Nothing worked, so they began a non-violent occupation of the golf course. After a gradual escalation—police beatings, threats from masked assailants—many of the Mohawks began carrying weapons. Special police forces were called in to raid the camp, and women stood them down. Someone began shooting—from which side is impossible to say—and a policeman was killed. After a weeks-long standoff during which many more shots were exchanged, the Mohawks were eventually evicted—but the land was protected from development.
Are we committed to winning as much as those Mohawk warriors?
Species extinction, fascist and Nazi extremism, global warming, police violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, resource extraction, industrial expansion, the prison industrial system. Are we committed to stopping these injustices?
If so, we must consider all means, including the use of force and violence.
This is an emergency.
HOW A REVOLUTION MIGHT BEGIN: THE CUBAN PRECEDENT
Perhaps one of the more important lessons of revolutionary history comes from Cuba, where in 1956, a small group of revolutionaries landed near the Sierra Maestra mountains. Almost immediately, the rebels were attacked and routed. Of the original group of 80, only about 20 regrouped in the mountains.
Nonetheless, over the next several years, their movement grew. They recruited locals, coordinated with underground cells in Havana and other urban areas, and built support networks elsewhere in Latin America. By January 1959, the revolutionaries had overthrown the rule of the Batista government.
Marx informs any revolutionary, but I am not a Marxist. Like China and the Soviet Union, Cuba followed a highly centralized, industrialized development path that contains much to criticize (while still representing an inspiring alternative to the capitalist model). The events that took place after the Cuban revolution are, to me, less interesting than the methods used to carry out the revolution itself. Che’s guerilla warfare techniques were well suited to the rural countryside and have influenced every revolutionary group since. And there is much to learn from how the Cuban underground organized.
The most important lesson, I think, is that the revolutionaries just got started. They didn’t wait for the perfect conditions, which they knew would never appear. They suffered major setbacks, but they persisted, and they had unshakeable confidence that they would prevail. Despite their lack of numbers, they had a good foundational strategy. By playing to their strengths, avoiding unwise confrontations, and by gradually building strength, they defeated a force that was initially much superior and initiated a tectonic political shift from capitalist vassal state to socialist nation-building experiment.
DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE SABOTAGE
On July 24th, two women—Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek—publicly admitted to sabotaging the Dakota Access Pipeline in an attempt to stop the desecration of native territory, the ongoing destruction of the climate, and threats to major rivers.
In an interview with them shortly after, they explained their motivations. Ruby, who was a kindergarten teacher before quitting her job to fight the pipeline, was in tears as she explained that those kids would have no future without action.
Jessica and Ruby have repeatedly called for others to take similar actions of eco-sabotage.
“Small forces of ecological commandos that could target the fundamental sources of power that are destroying the planet. We have seen examples of this. In Nigeria, commando forces have been fighting a guerrilla war of sabotage against Shell Oil Corporation for decades. At times, they have reduced oil output by more than 60%.”
As we noted, “no environmental group has ever had that level of success. Not even close. In the U.S., clandestine ecological resistance has been relatively minimal. However, isolated incidents have taken place. A 2013 attack on an electrical station in central California inflicted millions of dollars in damage to difficult-to-replace components used simple hunting rifles. The action took a total of 19 minutes, displaying the sort of discipline, speed, and tactical acumen required for special forces operations.
“Our situation is desperate. Things continue to get worse. False solutions, greenwashing, corporate co-optation, and rollbacks of previous victories are relentless. Resistance communities are fractured, isolated, and disempowered. However, the centralized, industrialized, and computerized nature of global empire means that the system is vulnerable. Power is mostly concentrated and projected via a few systems that are vulnerable.
“Even powerful empires can be defeated. But those victories won’t happen if we engage on their terms. Ecological special forces provide a method and means for decisive operations that deal significant damage to the functioning of global capitalism and industrialism. With enough coordination, these sorts of attacks could deal death blows to entire industrial economies, and perhaps (with the help of aboveground movements, ecological limits, and so on) to industrialism as a whole.
“Implementation of this strategy will require highly motivated, dedicated, and skilled individuals. Serious consideration of security, anonymity, and tactics will be required. But this system was built by human beings; we can take it apart as well.”
That strategy, while not sufficient on its own, would help us move towards a more effective, forceful movement. Read that article here.
This may sound drastic to you. But consider: the planet is being destroyed. We’re living through the sixth great mass extinction event. The most powerful nation in the world just elected Donald Trump. There is no sign of a looming political shift, and alternative parties and movements are largely sidelined or co-opted.
CHARLOTTESVILLE COMES HOME
As I write this, I’m at my sister’s house; she’s just given birth to my (first) nephew, who has beautiful brown skin and is what’s called “mixed race.” Before long, he will emerge into the world, and he will be perceived as a black child, and then as he grows, a black man.
White supremacy is experiencing a resurgence. Days before I write this, at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hundreds of virulent racists marched, chanting “blood and soil” and “white lives matter.” In front of studiously inactive police, they severely injured more than two dozen anti-racist protestors and one fascist plowed his car into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing a woman and severely injuring others.
The day after, as my sister lay in bed nursing her new beautiful baby boy, more white supremacists were gathering in downtown Seattle, about two miles away. Later, the Amerikkkan president defended the supremacists, saying there were “great people” involved in the white supremacist protests.
To anyone who is paying attention, this isn’t a surprise. Our nation has been built on foundation of systematic white supremacy in service of the extraction of resources. Those are the roots of this society, and the trend continues today. The everyday violence of this culture fuels its operation. The system is functioning perfectly, exploiting every possible method for economic, social, and political gain while funneling wealth to the top.
How can I make a better world for my nephew? How can I make a survivable world? My answer—at least one part of it—is by halting that everyday violence.
It’s time that we organized and carried out a revolution.
—
Max Wilbert is a writer, activist, and organizer with the group Deep Green Resistance. He lives on occupied Kalapuya Territory in Oregon.
bitcoin is not exactly money. It’s a potentially valuable abstraction of computational ‘work’ that ‘earns’ bitcoin value. But what is bitcoin value and what is the nature of the work? The answers are bizarre because they are nonsensical.
bitcoin value is an abstraction of participation in the history of the network and its transactions. ‘Work’ is a (largely) nonuseful recomputation of, first, the transaction history of the network — which has to be reprocessed each time there is a bitcoin transaction. Then, continual banging away at some useless math with added ‘weight factor’ that makes it arbitrarily difficult for computers to accomplish the generation of a new record-set over time.
The bitcoin algorithms adjust this factor in order to require enough ersatz work so that the heartbeat of the system pulses (produces a block) approximately every ten minutes… and they scale the computational complexity accordingly via input from bitcoin’s own daily developmental activity.
By crossing an invented computational abyss, millions of computers and other machines, many of which have been secretly compromised by hacks, are working full tilt, around the clock… to simply generate a deeper abyss requiring ever-more powerful and numerous computers to cross. And this generates ‘blocks’ in an economy of numbers in machines. These numbers are not exactly money, and their actual value is more complex than cash. And the machines must be serviced, cooled, attended and backed-up, as must the results of their nearly useless hyperactivity.
Most participants are using machines specially designed to resolve these invented computational targets, and as we make faster computers to do this, the network amplifies the difficulty to throttle the pulse.
What is all this about? Well, it’s not a simple question.
Let’s start with money.
What Is Money?
To understand money, one must begin to understand its sources. Perhaps the most fundamental of such introductions is the direct and fascinated observation of animals in nature. The origins of money (and memory) are in nature; exploring them has profound implications for own developing creativity and intelligence.
Beavers, squirrels and other small creatures, including the incredibly inventive corvids, store food (and sometimes treasures) in hiding places we call caches. Some predators may also cache food briefly (meat tends to go bad or get eaten by other creatures who can sense its presence). So, too, ants, wasps, bees and other social insects. This is actually a mode of living memory.
Notice the homonomy here? Cache and cash are the same sound, and this isn’t accidental. Direct relation with nature as and through living places is the original source of our concepts of value. Our relationships with environmentally accessible resources and caching are not merely the beginning of our monetary systems, they are the probable origin point of the peculiar forms of memory and cognition that are the hallmark of our species.
We carefully cache and value our dead. And money is an abstraction of dead people, places, and moments.
Our kind of mind was born in forests and places fraught with elaborate relational constellations of biodiversity and symbiotic intelligence. Alas, the nominal treasure we acquired there went haywire, and now we have nearly wiped those places off the map and erased them from our experience. What was their replacement?
Money (and machines). A representation of cached value, extensible to nearly any common domain of exchange.
There are no living places anymore. We do not encounter or create value… we get cash. Most of the time… that means that someone, or some ecology somewhere, is being wiped out. The results are representational forms of wealth and power.
We don’t have ancient forests any more, and the futures they portended are gone. What there are, are sheets of paper, ingots of gold, diamonds, and little banks of numbers… in machines. On balance sheets.
***
Numeric Supremacy
Numbers. We keep track of them. Too often they become lethal fictions with which ‘we’ (ostensibly: our societies and their systems) determine who lives and who dies. Who is wealthy and who bereft. Everyone is identified by and for the sake of numbers. We imagine these numbers to be true, just, inviolable. But we do not really understand the valuations or applications we celebrate and avow as real; there are always many aspects of value with crucial bearing on any analysis that we leave out of our accounting. Living beings, for example. Minds.
Many of our bizarre celebrations of monetary value or obedience to statistical analyses are simply flawed. It’s hard to get reasonable statistics for any real-world situation. Sometimes we are using stats that are cripplingly outdated or merely wrong. Assays attempting to discover the (astronomical) number of birds killed by electricity transmission only counted those found near wires. What’s the actual number, or a very close guess? We don’t know, because statistics are not entirely reliable beyond their well-behaved purposive contexts. Statistics, it turns out, are very often both manipulable and conveniently monodimensional.
So, too, the cash that stands sovereign behind them.
Such ‘numbers’ and our mishandling of them partly determine or suggest to us what to believe or think about ourselves, each other… the nature of the real. They portend what resources are protected, abstracted from nature, transported or obliterated, for what purposes, and whose ‘profit’.
We seem to have a serious vulnerability as regards representations. Our peculiar fantasies about the meaning of progress or success have cast life on Earth into direct competition with their outcomes—living beings and places now compete for terrain, safety and survival directly against not only objects, habits and machines… but mere data. And they lose.
So do we.
A photograph can become so popular that hundreds or even thousands of creatures must die simply to sustain and transmit it millions or billions of times. As unthinkable as this is, it is a fact: people die because numbers in machinesmerit more resources, attention, care, and nurturance than living beings.
Our electronic activity and transactions have absolutely lethal real world costs that no one is paying attention to. And as we continue to invest human attention and work in an increasingly unreal electronic representation of reality, those prices become staggering. They were unsurvivable 20 years ago. Today, they are simply an ever-expanding array of new forms of environmental, social and psychological rape. For profit. And they can hide in our cultures and lives in ways that are as deadly as they are invisible.
***
When Costs Go Explosive — And Invisible
One of the statistics that is modestly important here is the present population of our species and its growth over say, the last 100 years or so. These figures project their significance on everything we do, and dramatically magnify the repercussions of our common choices simply by increasing the power and frequency of the activities that produce them. An automobile trip to the grocery store has an environmental impact that rises precipitously as populations repeating it double or quadruple.
And this is what has been happening with our population for quite a while now. Perhaps it is nearly as significant that the number of objects per person… particularly machines… has skyrocketed in developed nations. In other words: there are at least two population problems. Ours, and that represented by our machines. Most are happy to complain about the humans. Nearly no one is complaining about the machines.
I find this suspicious.
Here are some ‘interesting numbers’: the statistics of human population growth. It took us at least 2 million years to reach our first billion. It took us approximately 123 to reach the next.
A mere 33 took us to our third.
The population gradient for ambient human bodies on Earth.
Prior to around 1800, the most serious human threats to the living planet were deforestation for the sake of construction, war or fuel and maybe wildfires. Secondary to those was mass hunting—particularly the vast atrocities that wiped out entire populations of animals for sport, base ignorance, commerce, or purposes related to human habitation of terrain.
But between the 2nd and 3rd tiers of the human population explosion, new and profusely invasive competitors for resources, attention and terrain were multiplying madly—at rates no one really bothered to examine. During this period, two specific human activity-threats skyrocketed into cultural and ecological dominance, and their impact continues to inscribe a deadly and indelible mark on both human history and terrestrial ecology. I speak here of the machine and the product-for-profit.
Machines are objects against which human beings and living places must directly compete—and we are losing this competition. Inert objects merit more care, attention, valuation, developmental interest, terrain rights, fuel and ‘freedom to reproduce’ than their human originators or the ecologies that are the sources of life and planetary homeostasis. Every living being and place has been subjected to their intrusion, emissions and domination—especially in war. Further, the invention and development of mechanical technology has had profound and unexpected impacts on human development.
Over the past 150 years, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has effectively redirected or even replaced our evolutionary developmental progress in a number of unexpected ways by inhibition, substitution, self-poisoning and, most significantly, by wiping out the ecologies which were the original sources of our evolutionary ascent; standing nearby as both agency of accomplishment and cause we find ‘the machine’.
I would argue that our broad-scale fascination with machines has derailed the development of the intellectual and relational assets necessary to direct our own cultures, let alone the technologies in question, with any degree of insight or wisdom. We have become materialists, and in so doing, we have sounded the death knell of the nurseries of life and intelligence on Earth.
Our extended cultures and collectives are not properly equipped to direct the forces that value, pursue and accomplish technological and industrial development. Our ordinary activities produce results so incredibly ill-considered that were we to pause even briefly in contemplation of them we would prohibit them absolutely. We do not thus pause. Money and the need for it fuel the conversion of the living planet to representations such as cash or goods. And so, too, our human potentials and minds.
It’s murder for money.
Numbers in machines that represent value.
Representations like money arise when what is being represented is no longer available to common experience or expression. As the forests of oral memory were wiped out, we acquired writing. As the experience of the profound value of living beings and places disappeared from common experience, we got a new kind of greenery: cash.
And as cash begins to disappear, we will achieve the ‘third wave’ of re-representation: digital money. Stuff that is not even an object. Nothing more than numbers in machines.
In the case of bitcoin, we are talking about machines that compete against living places and human lives for energy, space, resources, and … attention.
***
Hashing For Cash: Machines Get busy
So, let’s get down to business. What is bitcoin, really? You can think of it as a machine contagion—a network of devices amped to their performance tolerances—machines that do nothing but reprocess every transaction that ever occurred on their network (thus achieving ‘consensus’) while, at the same time, ‘mining’ new blocks of coins (currently worth about 25 btc) by solving a purposefully cumbersome mathematical formula which doesn’t actually accomplish anything other than enforcing computational difficulty. That is: making millions of machines grind away madly at nothing.
This mining process is both the reprocessing of transactions (to join the network), and a ‘weight’ factor that is incremented to insure that the average time for the entire network to ‘solve’ a block (that is, to produce an accurate guess close enough to a mathematically supplied target) is ‘about 10 minutes’.
When you initiate a new machine into the network, you download the current transaction record (a 6-gigabyte file) of the entire history of bitcoin and reprocess it (this takes around 24 hours). You then either ‘mine’ alone (an almost useless endeavor which would take ~98 years to solve a block) or you join a pool of machines. By joining a pool, you get statistically better performance in terms of satoshi (currently: USD $0.0000046543 each) earned as you are ‘rewarded’ for work done by your machine’s participation in the pool.
The more processing power (raw computational force over time) you can bring to bear on ‘the problem’ … the better a chance you have to earn incremental additions to your ‘wallet’ or account. Of course, most of the problem is invented… to be this kind of problem—one that requires more and more computational activity to qualify as complete. And we have now invented specialized machines and chips just to solve this problem.
Machines involved in mining are pressed to the limits of their power consumption and performance profiles; they are ‘pinned’ at 100%+ of their computing power, ceaselessly, and thus generate heat (as well as consuming copious quantities of electrical power).
Because they remain hot, they have to be electronically ventilated. This process of power-heating something we must in turn power-cool, for the phony ‘sake’ of mathematical processes intended to make more work each time they are implemented is deranged. We’re essentially turning computers into heaters that we have to cool to recompute previous computations with. On purpose. A single day of the environmental costs of this process are so catastrophic that if we ever did the accounting — if anyone did — we would immediately understand that this entire idea is a mode of ‘fracking the whole environment’ whose costs rise explosively with every moment we continue the process.
These traditionalists worry that a larger block size will raise the minimum amount of computing power required to fully participate in the Bitcoin network’s peer-to-peer process for clearing transactions. To fully participate in this process, a computer needs to receive a copy of every transaction that has ever been made on the network, which can add up to gigabytes of data every month. If the block limit is raised, then running a Bitcoin node will become even more resource-intensive, potentially pricing out smaller players.
Only a species that had gone entirely insane, and consciously intended to wipe out life on Earth would ever consider such a process. But any species that could actively celebrate and expand it — must be understood as both emphatically suicidal and openly omnicidal. In short: they intend to kill everything, anything, and themselves — and are hell-bent on the continuous and unlimited expansion of this agenda.
The activity of the bitcoin process and some similar networks are not only burning down the future; they are also obliterating the history of humanity and life on Earth, faster and more aggressively every moment, by destroying the living results and opportunities established by this history, and insuring that the benefits that might otherwise blossom into astonishing ‘interest on investment’, are killed off by the necessity of breeding, operating, heating and cooling millions of machines that do makework for a resource that only exists as numbers in machines.
No one with anything resembling a mind would ever allow, let alone celebrate this, and the fact that our modern cultures are doing both is a symptom more serious than our obsessions with war, ecological atrocity, rape-for-profit, and the generation of other lethal processes such as the automobile, the atomic bomb, nuclear reactors and prisons.
bitcoin is an invisible, self-expanding prison/war that, like fracking ‘hides the damage’ in every place and life on Earth. It is a way of violently undermining the very bases of life on Earth, and the fact that no one is doing the accounting is a sign that the social and environmental intelligences of our species have become actively self-compromising.
Imagine if your immune system started producing new forms of HIV instead of macrophages and antibodies… and you begin to get the picture.
Thankfully, there is a limit to the process, but it’s taking a while to get there. The limit is 21 million bitcoins, at least in the present implementation. What does this mean? Well, it means that, according to some sources, 80% of mineable bitcoins will have been acquired within about a year. It also means that the miner margin will shrink, making the process less attractive. It’s not clear what will take place, or if the tail end of this process can be completely accomplished. It’s also not impossible that the present implementation will begin to transform, or reiterate itself once all bitcoins have been mined.
Money is cached torture, murder, atrocity, and domination. It represents possible transactions in future time by obliterating living beings and opportunities in present time.
The only ‘value’ of the computation thus accomplished is that it leverages statistical complexity against computational power in order to mathematically throttle block (and thus bitcoin) production. So, we are inventing increasing quantities of work for increasing quantities of computers to do and the easier it becomes, the more we throttle it to make it harder… faster.
Purportedly, all of this bother results in profit, at least in theory. I say in theory because the putative returns require investments… of time, space, electricity, temperature, attention… and… computation. What one invests in one way is lost twice, both in the investment and in what more profitable or noble work might have been done with the same effort or resources.
Why are we purchasing banks of highly specialized computers and heating them up with computational burdens that tax their performance spec and then paying to cool them back down—in order to accomplish nothing useful?
The answer is that we have invented a ‘false problem’ that tens of thousands of machines now work to achieve the result for relatively uninterrupted, and these machines are themselves resources which require resources to build, run, track, back up, and otherwise maintain. How much varies widely by installation, but as you can see in the image that begins this essay, many people are building banks of machines that do nothing but process bitcoin blocks. Nothing else. Just that. And these have to be housed, stored, powered, repaired, attended, backed-up, protected, and cooled.
bitcoin is an essentially mechano-vampiric paradigm where massive amounts of actually usless computation are done with increasing ferocity while producing nothing of any value whatsoever except a kind of pure abstraction of computing having been done, and the glorious ‘record of transactions’ which becomes a veritable church of common computational record—and remains just as meaningless in that guise.
Those who are involved in this racket have chosen to dedicate cash, space, power and other resources to the process. But what is the process? It is to process a meaningless series of processes, ever-more ineffectively, on purpose.
That’s the wrong thing to dedicate resources to, and it produces direct mechanical competition against our own minds, cultures, needs and development. The idea of a homegrown electronic cryptocurrency is not entirely misguided. Personally, I think it would be powerful to develop something that produces value based on merit of actual work, discovery or contribution… accomplished by individuals or collectives. This is something I hope we may see relatively soon. But what bitcoin is and is doing is stridently malformed.
What exactly is profit? A crucial part of the answer is that it is the abstracted remains of obliterated lives, pricelessly irreplaceable ecosystems and precious relationships we never noticed or acknowledged, let alone understood. It is the remains of what might have been revolutionary intelligence, discovery, mutual uplift, evolution, wonder and actual human progress. It is the bodies and remains of animals, human beings and families, dreams of access to new developmental and creative opportunities, and living worlds of possibility that were burnt down and turned into little sheets of paper.
***
In all too many cases, the ‘next big thing’ is actually the next endlessly self-amplifying graveyard.
It is well-known that a ‘materially successful’ male or female represents an attractive mating partner for a variety of reasons, both profound and superficial in nature. In effect, the ‘standing cache’ of a given person or group is a signal about how effective various aspects of their skills and/or intelligence are in the specific domains that these representations are derived from.
The problem is this: the message is mixed, because their cache is social power… but its sources and functions often begin with atrocities,, some of which reach far back into the history of our people and the land.
Note : There are now a large number of cryptocurrencies, each with unique features, benefits and costs of operation. While some of these may utilize similar processes that require vast amounts of computational activity to generate, others do not. I am presently doing some research to understand more about the other systems, some of which are mentioned in the comments.
Puget Sound Anarchists and It’s Going Down have reported on four recent incidents of simple sabotage against rail operations. Using copper wire to signal track blockage (as depicted in a video on how to block trains), actionists have executed cheap and low-risk attacks to temporarily halt:
The Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy of Deep Green Resistance aims for cascading systems failure to shut down industrial destruction for good. Though these acts of sabotage are unlikely to cause more than minor inefficiencies in rail transport, they offer more return on investment than even the most successful aboveground actions.
For example, last year three DGR members halted a coal train for 12 hours before being arrested. Compared to other aboveground efforts, this was a very efficient operation, achieving a lengthy stoppage with a minimum of arrests. However, the total cost to carry out the action was high. Not only did the three activists spend significant time planning and executing the blockade itself, but a support team ensured rail employees and police couldn’t harm the activists without being documented (though this by no means guaranteed their safety.) Afterwards, the three arrestees faced multiple court dates consuming time and money, and causing stress. All charges were eventually dropped, but presumably the state would be less lenient for recidivism, raising the cost for repeated use of this tactic.
Contrast that to the statement by the Columbia River track saboteurs: “Trains were stopped for at least several hours and maybe more. Carrying out the action took less than an hour, about $40 materials, and little-no risk of being arrested.” (Presumably they also spent time beforehand to scout and plan.) Their use of underground tactics allowed them to hit and run, minimizing their risk, stress, and total investment in the action, and leaving them free to repeat the attacks at will. Not sticking around to be arrested is an enormous advantage, and our resistance movement must increase its use of guerrilla tactics to leverage our relatively meager resources.
DGR members don’t have the option of using underground tactics. By publicly opposing industrial civilization and calling for physically dismantling it, we’re obvious suspects for law enforcement to monitor and interrogate following underground attacks. Our role is to spread the analysis of the necessity and the feasibility of bringing it all down, and to support anyone who is able to carry out underground attacks.
We commend and thank those involved in these recent successful actions. We hope they’ll use the skills and confidence they’ve built in a low-risk environment to escalate their attacks to critical industrial infrastructure. And we hope none of them ever get caught, but if they do, we’ll be there to support them.
Analysis of Efficacy
On an Earth First! Journal page hosting the video on how to block trains, two commenters suggest this tactic isn’t effective at all:
“Lol if theres no reason a train should have a red signal, the dispatcher will have a crew sent out to find the problem, and in the mean time simply give trains authority past it. Try again.”
“Railroads have signal maintainers on duty 24/7/365 to troubleshoot issues like track circuits and keep trains moving on any given operating subdivision. I guess what you don’t understand is regardless of what you’re jumpering out there, trains can still move down the line.”
The posts are anonymous, and the authors express contempt for the actions of the saboteurs. Since they’re clearly not trying to give constructive feedback, it’s hard to know how seriously to take the critiques. If anyone has concrete knowledge of the impact of this tactic, please share. The better we understand the systems we want to disrupt and dismantle, the better our chance of success.
Featured image: Supporters of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments during a rally Saturday, Dec. 2, 2017 in Salt Lake City. AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
On Dec. 4, President Trump traveled to Utah to sign proclamations downsizing Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by nearly 50 percent. “[S]ome people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington,” Trump said. “And guess what? They’re wrong.”
Native American tribes and environmental organizations have already filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s action. In our analysis as environmental and natural resources law scholars, the president’s action is illegal and will likely be overturned in court.
Contests over land use
Since 1906 the Antiquities Act has given presidents the authority to set aside federal lands in order to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.”
History of the Antiquities Act.
When a president creates a national monument, the area is “reserved” for the protection of sites and objects there, and may also be “withdrawn,” or exempted, from laws that would allow for mining, logging or oil and gas development. Frequently, monument designations grandfather in existing uses of the land, but prohibit new activities such as mineral leases or mining claims.
Because monument designations reorient land use away from resource extraction and toward conservation, some monuments have faced opposition from local officials and members of Congress. In the past two decades, Utah has been a flashpoint for this debate.
In 1996 President Clinton designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a region of incredible slot canyons and remote plateaus. Twenty years later, President Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument, an area of scenic rock formations and sites sacred to Native American tribes.
Utah’s governor and congressional delegation have long argued that these monuments are larger than necessary and that presidents should defer to the state about whether to use the Antiquities Act.
Zinke’s review
In April President Trump ordered a review of national monuments designated in the past two decades. Trump directed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to recommend steps to eliminate or shrink these monuments or realign their management with Trump administration priorities.
Secretary Zinke’s review was an arbitrary and opaque process. During a rushed four-month period, Zinke visited only eight of the 27 monuments under review. At the end of the review, the Interior Department released to the public only a two-page summary of Zinke’s report.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visiting Bears Ears National Monument, May 9, 2017. DOI, CC BY-SA
In September the Washington Post published a leaked copy of Zinke’s detailed recommendations. They included downsizing, changing management plans or loosening restrictions at a total of 10 monuments, including three ocean monuments.
Trump’s proclamations
Trump’s proclamations on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante note the long list of objects that the monuments were created to protect, but claim that many of these objects are “not unique,” “not of significant scientific or historic interest,” or “not under threat of damage or destruction.”
As a result, Trump’s orders split each monument into smaller units, excluding large tracts that are deemed “unnecessary.” Areas cut from the monuments, including coal-rich portions of the Kaiparowits Plateau, will be reopened to mineral leasing, mining and other uses.
The key question at issue is whether the Antiquities Act empowers presidents to alter or revoke decisions by past administrations. The Property Clause of the Constitution gives Congress the power to decide what happens on “territory or other property belonging to the United States.” When Congress passed the Antiquities Act, it delegated a portion of that authority to the president so that administrations could act quickly to protect resources or sites that are threatened.
Critics of recent national monuments argue that if a president can create a national monument, the next one can undo it. However, the Antiquities Act speaks only of designating monuments. It says nothing about abolishing or shrinking them.
Two other early land management statutes – the Pickett Act of 1910 and the Forest Service Organic Act of 1897 – authorized the president to withdraw other types of land, and specifically stated that the president could modify or revoke those actions. In contrast, the Antiquities Act is silent on reversing past decisions.
Ruins at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, New Mexico, originally protected under the Antiquities Act by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 to prevent looting of archaeological sites. Steven C. Price/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA
In 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered abolishing the Castle-Pinckney National Monument – a deteriorating fort in Charleston, South Carolina – Attorney General Homer Cummings advised that the president did not have the power to take this step. (Congress abolished the monument in 1951.)
Congress enacted a major overhaul of public lands law in 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, repealing many earlier laws. However, it did not repeal the Antiquities Act. The House Committee that drafted the 1976 law also made clear in legislative reports that it intended to prohibit the president from modifying or abolishing a national monument, stating that the law would “specifically reserve to the Congress the authority to modify and revoke withdrawals for national monuments created under the Antiquities Act.”
Since that time, no president until Trump has attempted to revoke or downsize any national monument. Trump’s changes to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante depend on an argument that presidential declarations about what a national monument protects are subject to second-guessing by subsequent presidents. These claims run counter to every court decision that has examined the Antiquities Act.
Courts have always been deferential to presidents’ use of the law, and no court has ever struck down a monument based on its size or the types of objects it is designed to protect. Congress, rather than the President, has the authority to alter monuments, should it decide that changes are appropriate.
The value of preservation
This summer 118 other law professors, as well as California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and a number of conservation organizations, cited our analysis in letters to Secretary Zinke concluding that the president does not have authority to downsize or revoke national monuments.
Although many national monuments faced vociferous local opposition when they were declared, including Jackson Hole National Monument (now part of Grand Teton National Park), over time, Americans have come to appreciate them.
Indeed, Congress has converted many into national parks, including Acadia, the Grand Canyon, Arches and Joshua Tree. These four parks alone attracted over 13 million visitors in 2016. The aesthetic, cultural, scientific, spiritual and economic value of preserving them has long exceeded whatever short-term benefit could have been derived without legal protection.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are home to many natural and archaeological wonders, including scenic bluffs, petroglyphs, burial grounds and other sacred sites and a rich diversity of plant and animal life. The five Native American tribes that supported protecting Bears Ears, led by the Navajo Nation, have vowed to defend the monuments in court. President Trump’s effort to scale back these monuments oversteps his authority and is unlikely to stand.
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on April 27, 2017.
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an